IRL: Nashville: Mo Nunn Racing preview

** Felipe Giaffone is making his 23rd career Indy Racing League start and his
10th with Hollywood/Mo Nunn Racing with Saturday night's Firestone Indy 200
at Nashville Superspeedway.
** The 27-year-old Brazilian open-wheel driving veteran is on a...

** Felipe Giaffone is making his 23rd career Indy Racing League start and his
10th with Hollywood/Mo Nunn Racing with Saturday night's Firestone Indy 200
at Nashville Superspeedway.

** The 27-year-old Brazilian open-wheel driving veteran is on a streak of
seven consecutive top-six finishes after he took fourth place at the
Ameristar Casino Indy 200 at Kansas Speedway two weekends ago. last weekend
's third-place showing in the SunTrust Indy Challenge at Richmond
International Raceway. He was sixth at Fontana back in March, second at
Nazareth in April, third at the Indy 500 on Memorial Day Weekend, then fifth
at Texas, fourth at Pikes Peak and third at Richmond prior to the Kansas
event. Giaffone was seventh in the season opener and his Mo Nunn Racing
debut at Homestead.

** Giaffone remained fourth in the current driver points standings with 269
after the Kansas event. Teammates Helio Castroneves (315) and Gil de Ferran
(307) are first and second in the standings, followed by defending series
champion Sam Hornish, Jr., in third (296).

** After the first nine events of the season, Giaffone is back in second on
the 2002 IRL earnings list with $937,415. Indy 500 winner Helio Castroneves
leads with more than $2.14 million.

** Giaffone, the 2001 Indy Racing League Rookie of the Year, had 10 top-10
finishes and three top-fives with Treadway/Hubbard Racing last season,
including a season-best finish of second at Texas Motor Speedway in June.
Last year here at Nashville Superspeedway, Giaffone started ninth and
finished eighth.

** At the 86th Indy 500 on May 26, Giaffone made a valiant bid for his first
career IRL victory. He started fourth, led for 11 laps in all, and was
running second when he made a late-race bid to overtake then-leader and
eventual race-winner Castroneves, only to be held up by a slower car and
dropped back to third.

** For the first and only time this season, Giaffone ran with a teammate at
Indy. CART series regular Tony Kanaan drove a second team car, the #17
Hollywood/Mo Nunn Racing Chevrolet G-Force, and appeared headed to a victory
himself. Kanaan started fifth (the fastest rookie qualifier in the 33-car
field), alongside Giaffone on the second row, and led 23 laps before
crashing while leading after spinning in the oil of fellow CART regular
Bruno Junqueira.

** During his Indy Lights career, prior to joining the IRL in 2001, Giaffone
enjoyed a four-season run in the Indy Lights championship, a run that
included a 2000 victory from the pole at Michigan. He was fourth in Indy
Lights driver points in 1998 and 2000, and sixth in 1999 driving for
Conquest racing.

** This is Mo Nunn Racing's inaugural Indy Racing League season after
spending the first two years of its existence exclusively in CART with
Kanaan (2000-2001) and Alex Zanardi (2001). In addition to Giaffone and the
Hollywood car in the IRL, Mo Nunn Racing in 2002 is also campaigning Kanaan'
s #10 Pioneer-WorldCom/Mo Nunn Racing Honda-Lola in the CART series, Kanaan'
s fifth Champ Car season and third with Mo Nunn Racing.

** Giaffone began racing go-karts in Brazil at age 12. His father, Jose, was
a longtime Brazilian stock car racer. Giaffone's brother, Jose, and cousin
Affonso, also raced in Indy Lights.

** Also new for Giaffone this season: the 2002 season is his first as a
married man. He married his longtime girlfriend "Alice" on Jan. 15 in
Brazil. As the story goes, Giaffone won the favor of his new bride back in
1994 singing karaoke.

** Engineering Giaffone's #21 Hollywood Chevrolet this season is Eric Cowdin,
who moved to Mo Nunn Racing's IRL program after engineering Kanaan in the
CART series during the team's first two seasons. Cowdin, in fact,
engineered Kanaan's entries dating back to the 1996 and 1997 Dayton Indy
Lights Rookie of the Year and series championship seasons, respectively, at
Tasman Motorsports, as well as Kanaan's inaugural Champ Car season with
Tasman (later Forsythe Championship Racing) in 1999. Kanaan won that year's
U.S. 500 and sat on the pole at Long Beach.

** Peter Parrott, longtime Penske Motorsports and International Speedway
Corp., executive, joined Mo Nunn Racing this past offseason to take on the
role of team manager of the IRL program. Parrott was team manager at Vince
Granatelli Racing in the early 1990s when Mo Nunn Racing team owner Morris
Nunn was then engineer for Granatelli's entry for driver Arie Luyendyk.

** Prior to starting his own team in 2000, Morris Nunn was technical director
at Target/Chip Ganassi Racing during four consecutive CART championships won
by the team for drivers Jimmy Vasser (1996), Alex Zanardi (1997-98) and Juan
Montoya (1999). Nunn also engineered Emerson Fittipaldi's 1989 Indy 500
victory and CART series title. The former driver and Formula 1 team owner
came to the U.S. in the early 1980s and over the years engineered such
notable CART drivers as Eddie Cheever, Arie Luyendyk and Michael Andretti.
Nunn's list of Formula 1 drivers includes Clay Regazzoni, Roberto Guerrero,
Chris Amon, Jackie Ickx, Patrick Tambay, Nelson Piquet, Johnny Cecotto, and
Derek Daly.

FELIPE GIAFFONE

"Nashville is a very unusual track because it's an all-concrete oval, and it
's a very unusual length at a mile-and-a-third. But it's very driveable.
We had an excellent test there after Kansas. We got a lot of work done in
just about every area, including the engine department. Nashville is a
great city, a very fun atmosphere, and I think the people there really are
getting to like our type of racing. I'm feeling pretty good about the
weekend. We're on a roll as far as consistent, top-five finishes goes. But
we're definitely hungry for our first win. It seems like we've had chances
to get that first win this year, but one little thing or another gets in the
way. But that's racing. It's rare that you have the perfect weekend. But
I think we're working well together and it can happen at any time."